Beneath these elms, once more in sober bloom,
Thy tall, sad figure pacing down the street,
And now the robin sings above thy tomb!
Thy name on other shores may ne’er be known,
Though Rome austere no graver consul knew,
But Massachusetts her true son shall own;
Out of her soil thy hardy virtues grew.
She loves the man that chose the conquered cause,
With upright soul that bowed to God alone;
The clean hands that upheld her equal laws,
The old religion ne’er to be outgrown;
The cold demeanor, the warm heart beneath,
The simple grandeur of thy life and death.
F. B. SANBORN.
April, 1857.
SAMUEL HOAR.
SPEECH AT CONCORD, MASS., 4TH NOV. [ELECTION DAY], 1856.
HERE is a day on which more public good or evil is to be done than
was ever done on any day. And this is the pregnant season, when our
old Roman, Samuel Hoar, has chosen to quit this world. _Ab iniquo
certamine indignabundus recessit._
He was born under a Christian and humane star, full of mansuetude and
nobleness, honor and charity; and, whilst he was willing to face every
disagreeable duty, whilst he dared to do all that might beseem a man,
his self-respect restrained him from any foolhardiness. The Homeric
heroes, when they saw the gods mingling in the fray, sheathed their
swords. So did not he feel any call to make it a contest of personal
strength with mobs or nations; but when he saw the day and the gods
went against him, he withdrew, but with an unaltered belief. All was
conquered _præter atrocem animum Catonis_.
At the time when he went to South Carolina as the Commissioner of
Massachusetts, in 1844, whilst staying in Charleston, pending his
correspondence with the governor and the legal officers, he was
repeatedly warned that it was not safe for him to appear in public,
or to take his daily walk, as he had done, unattended by his friends,
in the streets of the city. He was advised to withdraw to private
lodgings, which were eagerly offered him by friends. He rejected the
advice, and refused the offers, saying that he was old, and his life
was not worth much, but he had rather the boys should troll his old
head like a foot-ball in their streets, than that he should hide it.
And he continued the uniform practice of his daily walk into all parts
of the city. But when the mob of Charleston was assembled in the
streets before his hotel, and a deputation of gentlemen waited upon him
in the hall to say they had come with the unanimous voice of the state
to remove him by force, and the carriage was at the door, he considered
his duty discharged to the last point of possibility. The force was
apparent and irresistible; the legal officer’s part was up; it was
now time for the military officer to be sent; and he said, “Well,
gentlemen, since it is your pleasure to use force, I must go.” But his
opinion was unchanged.
In like manner now, when the votes of the Free States, as shown in the
recent election in the State of Pennsylvania, had disappointed the
hopes of mankind and betrayed the cause of freedom, he considered the
question of justice and liberty, for his age, lost, and had no longer
the will to drag his days through the dishonors of the long defeat, and
promptly withdrew, but with unaltered belief.
He was a very natural, but a very high character; a man of simple
tastes, plain and true in speech, with a clear perception of
justice, and a perfect obedience thereto in his action; of a strong
understanding, precise and methodical, which gave him great eminence
in the legal profession. It was rather his reputation for severe
method in his intellect than any special direction in his studies
that caused him to be offered the mathematical chair in Harvard
University, when vacant in 1806. The severity of his logic might have
inspired fear, had it not been restrained by his natural reverence,
which made him modest and courteous, though his courtesy had a grave
and almost military air. He combined a uniform self-respect with a
natural reverence for every other man; so that it was perfectly easy
for him to associate with farmers, and with plain, uneducated, poor
men, and he had a strong, unaffected interest in farms, and crops, and
weathers, and the common incidents of rural life. It was just as easy
for him to meet on the same floor, and with the same plain courtesy,
men of distinction and large ability. He was fond of farms and trees,
fond of birds, and attentive to their manners and habits; addicted to
long and retired walks; temperate to asceticism, for no lesson of his
experience was lost on him, and his self-command was perfect. Though
rich, of a plainness and almost poverty of personal expenditure, yet
liberal of his money to any worthy use, readily lending it to young
men, and industrious men, and by no means eager to reclaim of them
either the interest or the principal. He was open-handed to every
charity, and every public claim that had any show of reason in it. When
I talked with him one day of some inequality of taxes in the town, he
said it was his practice to pay whatever was demanded; for, though he
might think the taxation large and very unequally proportioned, yet he
thought the money might as well go in this way as in any other.
The strength and the beauty of the man lay in the natural goodness and
justice of his mind, which, in manhood and in old age, after dealing
all his life with weighty private and public interests, left an
infantile innocence, of which we have no second or third example,--the
strength of a chief united to the modesty of a child. He returned from
courts or congresses to sit down, with unaltered humility, in the
church or in the town-house, on the plain wooden bench where honor came
and sat down beside him.
He was a man in whom so rare a spirit of justice visibly dwelt, that if
one had met him in a cabin or in a forest he must still seem a public
man, answering as sovereign state to sovereign state; and might easily
suggest Milton’s picture of John Bradshaw, that “he was a consul from
whom the fasces did not depart with the year, but in private seemed
ever sitting in judgment on kings.” Everybody knew where to find him.
What he said, that would he do. But he disdained any arts in his
speech: he was not adorned with any graces of rhetoric,
“But simple truth his utmost skill.”
So cautious was he, and tender of the truth, that he sometimes
wearied his audience with the pains he took to qualify and verify
his statements, adding clause on clause to do justice to all his
conviction. He had little or no power of generalization. But a plain
way he had of putting his statement with all his might, and now and
then borrowing the aid of a good story, or a farmer’s phrase, whose
force had imprinted it on his memory, and, by the same token, his
hearers were bound to remember his point.
The impression he made on juries was honorable to him and them. For
a long term of years, he was at the head of the bar in Middlesex,
practising, also, in the adjoining counties. He had one side or the
other of every important case, and his influence was reckoned despotic,
and sometimes complained of as a bar to public justice. Many good
stories are still told of the perplexity of jurors who found the law
and the evidence on one side, and yet Squire Hoar had said that he
believed, on his conscience, his client entitled to a verdict. And what
Middlesex jury, containing any God-fearing men in it, would hazard
an opinion in flat contradiction to what Squire Hoar believed to be
just? He was entitled to this respect; for he discriminated in the
business that was brought to him, and would not argue a rotten cause;
and he refused very large sums offered him to undertake the defense of
criminal persons.
His character made him the conscience of the community in which he
lived. And in many a town it was asked, “What does Squire Hoar think of
this?” and in political crises, he was entreated to write a few lines
to make known to good men in Chelmsford, or Marlborough, or Shirley,
what that opinion was. I used to feel that his conscience was a kind
of meter of the degree of honesty in the country, by which on each
occasion it was tried, and sometimes found wanting. I am sorry to say
he could not be elected to Congress a second time from Middlesex.
And in his own town, if some important end was to be gained,--as,
for instance, when the county commissioners refused to rebuild the
burned court-house, on the belief that the courts would be transferred
from Concord to Lowell,--all parties combined to send Mr. Hoar to the
Legislature, where his presence and speech, of course, secured the
rebuilding; and, of course also, having answered our end, we passed him
by and elected somebody else at the next term.
His head, with singular grace in its lines, had a resemblance to the
bust of Dante. He retained to the last the erectness of his tall but
slender form, and not less the full strength of his mind. Such was,
in old age, the beauty of his person and carriage, as if the mind
radiated, and made the same impression of probity on all beholders.
His beauty was pathetic and touching in these latest days, and, as now
appears, it awakened a certain tender fear in all who saw him, that the
costly ornament of our homes and halls and streets was speedily to be
removed. Yet how solitary he looked, day by day in the world, this man
so revered, this man of public life, of large acquaintance and wide
family connection! Was it some reserve of constitution, or was it only
the lot of excellence, that with aims so pure and single, he seemed to
pass out of life alone, and, as it were, unknown to those who were his
contemporaries and familiars?
[The following sketch of Mr. Hoar from a slightly different point of
view, was prepared by Mr. Emerson, shortly after the above speech
appeared in “Putnam’s Magazine” (December, 1856), at the request of
the Editor of the “Monthly Religious Magazine,” and was printed there,
January, 1857. It is here appended as giving some additional traits of
a characteristic figure which may serve as a pendant in some respects
to that of Dr. Ripley.]
Mr. Hoar was distinguished in his profession by the grasp of his
mind, and by the simplicity of his means. His ability lay in the
clear apprehension and the powerful statement of the material points
of his case. He soon possessed it, and he never possessed it better,
and he was equally ready at any moment to state the facts. He saw
what was essential and refuted whatever was not, so that no man
embarrassed himself less with a needless array of books and evidences
of contingent value.
These tactics of the lawyer were the tactics of his life. He had
uniformly the air of knowing just what he wanted and of going to that
in the shortest way. It is singular that his character should make
so deep an impression, standing and working as he did on so common
a ground. He was neither spiritualist nor man of genius nor of a
literary nor an executive talent. In strictness the vigor of his
understanding was directed on the ordinary domestic and municipal
well-being. Society had reason to cherish him, for he was a main
pillar on which it leaned. The useful and practical super-abounded
in his mind, and to a degree which might be even comic to young and
poetical persons. If he spoke of the engagement of two lovers, he
called it a contract. Nobody cared to speak of thoughts or aspirations
to a black-letter lawyer, who only studied to keep men out of prison,
and their lands out of attachment. Had you read Swedenborg or Plotinus
to him, he would have waited till you had done, and answered you out
of the Revised Statutes. He had an affinity for mathematics, but it
was a taste rather than a pursuit, and of the modern sciences he liked
to read popular books on geology. Yet so entirely was this respect to
the ground plan and substructure of society a natural ability, and
from the order of his mind, and not for “tickling commodity,” that
it was admirable, as every work of nature is, and like one of those
opaque crystals, big beryls weighing tons, which are found in Acworth,
New Hampshire, not less perfect in their angles and structure, and
only less beautiful, than the transparent topazes and diamonds.
Meantime, whilst his talent and his profession led him to guard the
material wealth of society, a more disinterested person did not exist.
And if there were regions of knowledge not open to him, he did not
pretend to them. His modesty was sincere. He had a childlike innocence
and a native temperance, which left him no temptations, and enabled
him to meet every comer with a free and disengaged courtesy that had
no memory in it
“Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.”
No person was more keenly alive to the stabs which the ambition and
avarice of men inflicted on the commonwealth. Yet when politicians
or speculators approached him, these memories left no scar; his
countenance had an unalterable tranquillity and sweetness; he had
nothing to repent of,--let the cloud rest where it might, he dwelt in
eternal sunshine.
He had his birth and breeding in a little country town, where the
old religion existed in strictness, and spent all his energy in
creating purity of manners and careful education. No art or practice
of the farm was unknown to him, and the farmers greeted him as one of
themselves, whilst they paid due homage to his powers of mind and to
his virtues.
He loved the dogmas and the simple usages of his church; was
always an honored and sometimes an active member. He never shrunk
from a disagreeable duty. In the time of the Sunday laws he was a
tithing-man; under the Maine Law he was a prosecutor of the liquor
dealers. It seemed as if the New England church had formed him to be
its friend and defender; the lover and assured friend of its parish
by-laws, of its ministers, its rites, and its social reforms. He was a
model of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called
a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the
style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion,
as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a
few young men to whom these manners are native.
I have spoken of his modesty; he had nothing to say about himself;
and his sincere admiration was commanded by certain heroes of the
profession, like Judge Parsons and Judge Marshall, Mr. Mason and Mr.
Webster. When some one said, in his presence, that Chief Justice
Marshall was failing in his intellect, Mr. Hoar remarked that “Judge
Marshall could afford to lose brains enough to furnish three or four
common men, before common men would find it out.” He had a huge
respect for Mr. Webster’s ability, with whom he had often occasion to
try his strength at the bar, and a proportionately deep regret at Mr.
Webster’s political course in his later years.
There was no elegance in his reading or tastes beyond the crystal
clearness of his mind. He had no love of poetry; and I have heard that
the only verse that he was ever known to quote was the Indian rule:
“When the oaks are in the gray,
Then, farmers, plant away.”
But I find an elegance in his quiet but firm withdrawal from all
business in the courts which he could drop without manifest detriment
to the interests involved (and this when in his best strength), and
his self-dedication thenceforward to unpaid services of the Temperance
and Peace and other philanthropic societies, the Sunday Schools, the
cause of Education, and specially of the University, and to such
political activities as a strong sense of duty and the love of order
and of freedom urged him to forward.
Perfect in his private life, the husband, father, friend, he was
severe only with himself. He was as if on terms of honor with those
nearest him, nor did he think a lifelong familiarity could excuse any
omission of courtesy from him. He carried ceremony finely to the last.
But his heart was all gentleness, gratitude and bounty.
With beams December planets dart,
His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
July was in his sunny heart,
October in his liberal hand.
THOREAU.
A QUEEN rejoices in her peers,
And wary Nature knows her own,
By court and city, dale and down,
And like a lover volunteers,
And to her son will treasures more,
And more to purpose, freely pour
In one wood walk, than learned men
Will find with glass in ten times ten.
IT seemed as if the breezes brought him,
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him,
As if by secret sign he knew
Where in far fields the orchis grew.
THOREAU.[15]
HENRY DAVID THOREAU was the last male descendant of a French ancestor
who came to this country from the Isle of Guernsey. His character
exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood, in singular
combination with a very strong Saxon genius.
He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He
was graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary
distinction. An iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges
for their service to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his
debt to them was important. After leaving the University, he joined
his brother in teaching a private school, which he soon renounced. His
father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and Henry applied himself
for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil
than was then in use. After completing his experiments, he exhibited
his work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained their
certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best London
manufacture, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him
that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied, that he
should never make another pencil. “Why should I? I would not do again
what I have done once.” He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous
studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as
yet never speaking of zoölogy or botany, since, though very studious of
natural facts, he was incurious of technical and textual science.
At this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, whilst all
his companions were choosing their profession, or eager to begin some
lucrative employment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be
exercised on the same question, and it required rare decision to refuse
all the accustomed paths and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of
disappointing the natural expectations of his family and friends: all
the more difficult that he had a perfect probity, was exact in securing
his own independence, and in holding every man to the like duty. But
Thoreau never faltered. He was a born protestant. He declined to give
up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft
or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art
of living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it
was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his
own belief. Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted
money, earning it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, as
building a boat or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying, or other
short work, to any long engagements. With his hardy habits and few
wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was
very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less
time to supply his wants than another. He was therefore secure of his
leisure.
A natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical
knowledge and his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances
of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and
extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line
distance of his favorite summits,--this, and his intimate knowledge
of the territory about Concord, made him drift into the profession of
land-surveyor. It had the advantage for him that it led him continually
into new and secluded grounds, and helped his studies of Nature. His
accuracy and skill in this work were readily appreciated, and he found
all the employment he wanted.
He could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was
daily beset with graver questions, which he manfully confronted. He
interrogated every custom, and wished to settle all his practice on an
ideal foundation. He was a protestant _à outrance_, and few lives
contain so many renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never
married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he
refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine,
he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used
neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be
the bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth, and
knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance.
Perhaps he fell into his way of living without forecasting it much,
but approved it with later wisdom. “I am often reminded,” he wrote in
his journal, “that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Crœsus, my
aims must be still the same, and my means essentially the same.” He
had no temptations to fight against,--no appetites, no passions, no
taste for elegant trifles. A fine house, dress, the manners and talk of
highly cultivated people were all thrown away on him. He much preferred
a good Indian, and considered these refinements as impediments to
conversation, wishing to meet his companion on the simplest terms.
He declined invitations to dinner-parties, because there each was in
every one’s way, and he could not meet the individuals to any purpose.
“They make their pride,” he said, “in making their dinner cost much;
I make my pride in making my dinner cost little.” When asked at table
what dish he preferred, he answered, “The nearest.” He did not like the
taste of wine, and never had a vice in his life. He said,--“I have a
faint recollection of pleasure derived from smoking dried lily-stems,
before I was a man. I had commonly a supply of these. I have never
smoked anything more noxious.”
He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them
himself. In his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much
country as was unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of
miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers’ and fishermen’s
houses, as cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he
could better find the men and the information he wanted.
There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always
manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except
in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I
may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call
his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed
he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first
instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient
was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course,
is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion
would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars
conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations
with one so pure and guileless. “I love Henry,” said one of his
friends, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as
soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.”